Diablo II Single Player Thread - 2

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I definitely wouldn't waste an Um. For me, Um runes are only for runewords. In a shield, you can get 19% out of a pdiamond versus 22% for an Um. The 3% doesn't do anything for me. In the case of a helm, it's even worse, as you only get 15% resist all. You can get up +15% resist all from a jewel, and while the +15% are a bit hard to find, if you're willing to settle for something in the 10%-15% range, it likely won't make a difference. Just yesterday I got a jewel that give +14% resist all and 9% mf - I'd much rather stick that in a helm than an Um.

I don't know why Silks of the Victor is so hard to find. Perhaps it's because it's in a TC that doesn't get picked frequently (I don't know this to be true - I'm just speculating). Whatever the reason, it's drop frequency is similar to high end excecptional unique equipment. The only reason that it's not a highly sought after piece of equipment is that it doesn't do much. It has high defense, +1 skills, and not much else. There are several armors in the game that give +1 skills in the game, offer good defense, and then some.

The Gul is very nice indeed.

 

Absolutely - and a scintillating (+15% variety) jewel of anything is always s a superior choice compared to a Um, irrespective of the "anything" is (because it's nothing on an Um).

Where are you running? I have been doing Pits on players8 daily and I've been getting only two types of runes: Jack and Squat.

 

Well that settles it - I need to start making further progress through the game. The reason I'm running the pits is because it's the only level area 85 I have acess to. Well, that and the mausoleum, although that's not nearly as good of a target seeing as how it is filled with undead unleechables.

I have an ATMA related question for you. Is it possible to transfer gold between characters? I'm just thinking that by the time I'm ready to start my necro, I could give him a million or so gp to go shopping early on. I have a collection of stuff for him, but I could definitely shop a better wand than the one from the infernal set.

I already have a bunch of things set aside for him once he gains some levels. Ume's Lament is an excellent levelling wand - +2 to all skills, and a level requirement of just 20. I'll probably make lore in a 2-socket helm. Although, now that I think about it, I have a Wormskull and a Peasant Crown, which also offers +1 skills, but in the case of Peasant Crown, I think it gives +20 to vitality and energy - and they all have level requirements in the 20s.

I know my belt and gloves will be standard mf gear - Chance Guards and Goldwrap. I have a +1 summoning skills amulet with a level requirement of just 15. Strangely, I have found exactly zero unique rings of any kind with my barbarian, so while I would normally go with two Nagelrings, I don't have any.

About the only thing I'm unsure of is the armor. I have my choice of a bunch of different low level set and uniques to pick from to start off. I'm thinking ahead to the armor that I'll use until I can move into something high end. There are two major contenders as I see it:

Option 1: Lionheart - (HelLumFal)

Sir Rechet was right when he pointed out that this armor is not a great choice for any melee class, and especially not for a melee class that can benefit from high defense, as it lacks any +def. If defense isn't important to you though, it has a lot to offer:

+20% enhanced damage (useless for a necro)
-15% requirements (also useless - I'll likely make it in mage plate or similar)
+25 Strength
+10 Energy
+20 Vitality
+15 Dexterity
+50 life
All res +30%
Required Level: 41

So this one gives you a ton of life (both directly and indirectly through saved stat points), and the +30% resist all is definitely nice.

Option 2: Bone (SolUmUm)

This one is also in my price range. It won't give me nearly the bonus to life, but it's a very affordable way to get armor with +2 to all skills:

15% ctc Level 10 Bone Armor when struck (hopefully useless, as I won't get hit much)
15% ctc level 10 Bone Spear on striking (ditto, because I won't be hitting)
+2 to Necromancer Skill Levels
+100-150 mana (potentially very useful for spamming CE)
All Resistances +30%
Damage Reduced by 7
Level Required: 47

At this point I'm leaning towards Bone, just because +skills are so much more important than everything else with a necro, even though to bonus life is tempting.

I also find it odd that the Armor runewords intended for a specific class have such wildly different price ranges. The necro one is on the high end, requiring two Um runes. But the Paladin one is definitely the most expensive, as you need a Gul. On the other end of the spectrum, the Amazon one is dirt cheap (although it still offers +2 skills just like all the rest) in that the highest rune it requires is Shael, and has a level requirement of just 29. The Amazon one is actually very good, as it offers a ctc a level 15 Valkyrie, which is functional even on hell difficulty.

EDIT: I was looking through a rune hunting guide last night as well, and the author came to some interesting conclusions. As of the new patch, he did conclude that runes are much easier to find, and so he set about doing full clears of areas in the game to see where you get the biggest bang for your buck.

He decided to do 60 full clears of the areas, so he could get a meaningful average and standard deviation. He also timed his runs so he could do a runes found per unit time calculation. Some things have stayed the same with the most recent patch. For example, if you're interested in runes Ist or lower, the Countess is still far and away your best source. So he limited his calculations for number of runes found beyond Ist. He then further narrowed down his search by looking at the game code and finding out which areas are capable of spawning monsters that can drop a Zod. This is where it gets interesting.

In the new patch, any monster capable of dropping from TC66 or higher also has a chance (albeit a small one) of dropping from Rune 33, which is a Zod. TC66 ain't that high - in fact, it covers most monsters in the game on Hell difficulty. The problem is that most monsters capable of dropping a Zod only do so at a rate of about 1 in 100,000 drops according to the code.

So he set out doing his full clears in single player on /players8. His conclusion was that the best place to get a rune hgiher than Ist is by running cows. Full clears (minus to cow king of course) yielded a rune higher than Ist in 9 of the 60 runs, or 15% of the time (none of those 9 were a Zod, although according the code, a Zod drop is possible here). There's no reason why a cow should have a higher chance of dropping a high rune than any other generic hell monster according to the code, and he suspects that the results are due to such a large number of kills in that area.

The second best area for finding high runes was very surprising - the Arcane Sanctuary. This is due to the high concentration of ghosts, which have a higher than average chance (compared to other monsters - so still relatively low) of picking from TC66(Good) which contains things like jewelry, gems, and - of course - runes. This was actually better in terms of total runes found than hell cows - 12 of the 60 runs yielded a rune higher than Ist, with 3 of those 12 yielding two runes higher than Ist.

The obvious question then, is if the Arcane Sanctuary offered more high rune drops than cows, then why are cows better? The answer is twofold: The Arcane Sanctuary takes a lot longer to clear than the cow level for starters. There's no quick way of doing it, no matter what character you're playing, whether or not you use teleport, or any other means of getting around quickly. He found it took him nearly twice as long to clear the Arcane Sanctuary as it did to clear the cows, and so two runs from cows were superior to one run of the Arcane Sanctuary. He found 1.29 runes hihger than Ist per hour spent playing doing the Arcane Sanctuary, while he received 1.47 runes per hour doing cows.

The caveat he places on this was that he was running a LF zon - the premier character in the game as far as cow killing is concerned. The author concedes that if you have a character less proficient in killing cows, and it takes you just as long to do the cow level as the Arcane Sanctuary, you may want to do the Arcane Sanctuary instead.

The second reason is another factor that slows you down even further - the monsters with the best chance of dropping runes are the ghosts. However, if you kill a ghost while it is hovering in an open area with no ground below it, anything it would have dropped is lost to the inky depths below.

All of the level 85 areas were very similar in terms of drops higher that Ist - 60 runs of all the level 85 areas yielded between 5 and 7 drops higher than Ist, and no one particular area stood out as being considerably better or worse than the others.

 

That's what I was leaning towards. The only other thing I really look for on my necro is high resists, and since both armors offer the same +30% resist all, that's not a factor in the decision. One thing the switch to SP has allowed is the making of a lot of the mid-range runewords (or perhaps this is just because of the improved rune drops). It's also changed my interpretation of what a decent rune is. Before, anything Amn or higher I considered a decent rune. Now it's more like Lum or higher.

The other thing I like about the mid range runewords is that you can get a decent amount of +resist all on a lot of the armors. Before SP, if I wanted to get a resist all on my armor, I was basically chained to either Skins of the Vampermagi or Goldskin (usually the latter).

Once you move onto the high end runewords though, I think there really are two that shine above all the rest - Enigma and Chains of Honor. (If you have the mod for adding the ladder only runewords, you could make an arguement that Fortitude would be included as well.) Once you can use them, I don't see why you'd chose any other one.

I was actually quite surprised by the Arcane Sanctuary result. I've never been a speed freak, so to me, the extra time it takes to run the AS isn't too big of a deal. They also changed the Summoner to drop very similar to the Countess - he now drops up to a Lo, although rarely. Each of the chests that you can get to by picking the "wrong" path to the summoner can now drop up to Ist. The Countess is still the preferred run on bnet, because you never know which direction the Summoner will spawn, and so the Countess is usually much quicker with the same drop percentages. OTOH, the necro is certainly NOT a character that can do AS quickly.

Yeah, it wasn't really worrying about dying (there's no XP penalty in normal) but more about speeding up the levelling process. I could probably purchase a +3 Raise Skeleton, +3 Skeleton Mastery necro wand from ATMA, as she doesn't sell anything with automods higher than you can access at level 12, so there's a good chance of getting something like that.

 

I agree - the only reason I mentioned Fortitude is that it would offer superior damage and defense than CoH. It would only be for a melee class that was looking for max damage.

Oh definitely - Enigma for casters, CoH for melee.

The other big difference in our playing styles is I don't care nearly as much about max block than you do (at least regarding casters). And when you think about it, it makes sense. You base your character around avoiding the hit entirely, which means max block. I base my character around being able to take the hit and survive, so I go max life, and max resistances.

Oh, it's a terrible area for a skellimancer. The narrow paths prevent your army from being able to easily engage the enemy. A dual elemental sorceress could probably run the area with ease (especially the one with the red teleportation portals - she could still stuff from the other side).

 

Well, I have to officially stop whining about my lack of finds in the Pits. I didn't get a single good rune this weekend, but one of the boss packs dropped an item I have never possessed before - the unique balrog skin - Arkaine's Valor. I'm also playing one of the few classes that can make optimal use of it - once I hit level 85.

The thing with Arkaine's Valor is it offers massive defense (1400) and +2 to all skills, but not much else. So for a barbarian with a high strength focusing on defense, it's awesome. But for just about any other class, you'd rather have something like CoH, Enigma, or even one of the class-specific armors that give +2 to all skills. Although with a barbarian, +2 to skills basically makes everything better - AR, damage, defense, resistances, life, mana, etc.

 

I thought the boost to vitality and the damage reduction were so small that it wouldn't make much of a difference - but I may be wrong.

I think your plan on WSK is optimal. You've reached the point that it is nearly impossible for you to get anything of value from Baal's drops anyway, so you're doing it primarily for XPs. Since Baal and his minions are worth far more than everything else in WSK2, WSK3, and WSC combined, it makes sense to do it exactly the way you're doing it.

 

I just looked it up - it's 0.5 vitality per level. So I guess that means you get one extra point in vitality every two levels? I've seen +life per level, but not vitality. I wonder if you actually get 0.5 per level - which I will discover when I hit level 86, and see if I gain two bonus life or 4.

 

You completed all the quests in Act I NM on p8 in 20 minutes? That's amazing. I know there have been people who can do acts that quickly, but they don't complete all the quests. (For example, you don't HAVE to kill Blood Raven or the Countess to finish the Act.)

 

Impressive indeed.

I thought that 30 minutes was ambitious. (Although I thought 20 minutes was very ambitious for Act I.) I was just thinking that you cannot do much of anything to avoid doing all three sewer levels for Radamant, both levels for the Claw Vipers, and all three levels of the maggot lair. Plus, if you get unlucky, you may have to take all four directions for the AS, and the True Tomb of Tal Rasha is pretty darn big, so it can potentially take quite a while to find the burial chamber.

Act 3 will almost certainly be the longest of the first four, unless you get very lucky. None of Khalim's relics are necessarily easy to find. There's no way to predict where the Spider Cavern will be located on the map, where the Gidbinn and stairs for the Flayer Dungeon are located, and then there's the whole thing of three levels in the Flayer Dungeon itself. While the Sewers beneath Travincal are most certainly in a fixed location, the stairs down to level 2 are not, so that could potentially take some time too. The Durances are also quite large and it can take some time to find the stairs down.

There aren't too many "skipable" areas if you want to complete all the quests in Act III, and the few there are I usually do anyway. In Lower Travincal, Travincal, and Upper Travincal, there are two super chests in each area (even though they aren't gold or sparkly they drop like gold sparkly chests), and I usually make it a point to seek them out. I did hang around NM Mephisto for a while, but it was to gain items - not XPs. By the time I hit NM Meph, I was about level 60. I probably ran him about 20 times, and I may have leveled once in that time - so I really think there's no point in running anything for XPs prior to Act V.

I agree - it's a potentially dangerous act depending on what spawns, the XPs aren't particularly good, and most areas contain nothing that you need. Even in normal, that's an Act you can complete in one sitting. Of the big three areas at the start of the Act, the only one that you need to spend any time at all on is the middle one to kill Izual - there's nothing else in those areas that would make you want to stay longer than it takes to find the stairs to the next area.

Obviously, you'll want to do the hellforge quest, but there's nothing else there worth doing, the River of Flame is small, and while the Pandemonium Fortress is a big area, it has a fixed layout, so it can still be done quickly.

Well, it will be worth getting the WP there just for running purposes. I stayed in Act V NM until I was nearly level 80, because the XPs were so good. I was able to complete Shenk, Eldritch, Pindle, and Baal in about 15 minutes (just clearing the central area of the WSK - not all the side areas), and about two runs was all it took to gain a level. Anything that gives you a level in 30 minutes once you get into the 70s is worth doing.

I don't even know what that is. (Din's Curse - I know what the Laker game is.)

 

I did the Maggot Lair and Claw Viper temple last night without incident. But that's not the news.

As my battle hammer came crashing down on the unique Dark Elder, the eclipse lifted ever so slightly. A small beam of light was cast down from the heavens and illuminated a unique ring resting near the corpse. I think I heard angels singing. I finally have a Raven Frost. And a none-too-shabby one at that. 19 dex 228 AR. (Range for dex is 15-20, range for AR is 150-250.